Since his days in a rock band, Danny Elfman has composed the music for some big movies including Mission: Impossible, Men in Black, Spider-Man, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. In television, he composed the famous theme for The Simpsons.

"If I died today, they'd probably put that on my gravestone – 'he wrote The Simpsons theme'," he says. "That was like winning the lottery – totally random thing that I did for fun, never expecting anybody to hear it, and here it is having its 25th anniversary."

But it is Elfman's partnership with director Tim Burton that has been the most enduring, covering 15 movies over almost three decades. Just about everything in the director's imaginative, Gothic-infused resume including Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland, with a 16th, the drama Big Eyes, out soon.

Vocals: Elfman sang the role of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas. Photo: Supplied

It is a partnership that will be celebrated in a concert at the Adelaide Festival in March. Elfman will conduct the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, accompanied by a choir, while excerpts from their movies, sketches and storyboards screen.

The former frontman for Oingo Boingo, Elfman suggests from Los Angeles that Burton really is as idiosyncratic as he comes across publicly.

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"He's a very unique, interesting odd personality but he's like family in a weird way," he says. "I'm not sure I'm the most normal person either. The places he goes to in his mind don't seem very alien to me."

Their partnership began with a call asking Elfman if he wanted to meet Burton, then a young animator, to talk about a film.

"I first assumed he just wanted a song – I'd already been doing some songs for films – but when he said he wanted a score, I was pretty mystified and I wasn't sure I could handle it," he says. "But I liked him. We had a lot in common; we grew up on all the same stuff.

"So I went home and recorded a demo – a piece that I'd had in my head from meeting him. I sent it out on cassette and expected never to hear from him again but I got the job."

Working on the comic Pee-wee's Big Adventure flowed onto other movies as Burton's career flourished. Elfman has missed only two Burton movies, including his adaptation of the Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. On Ed Wood, Burton went to Howard Shore after he and Elfman argued under the pressure of finishing Batman Returns.

"It's inevitable over 28 years, two volatile personalities like us, we had to go off somewhere," Elfman says. "I'm just grateful we didn't stay off. Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock famously had a big fight and never did speak to each other again in their lives. I'm grateful that we didn't end up like that."

The idea for the concert came after Elfman assembled a 25th anniversary box set of his Burton scores.

"It really forced me to go back to listen to everything, which is something I never, ever do," he says. "I'm almost pathologically averse to listening to anything I've ever done.

"It was a big project. It took a couple of months to assemble this huge collection."

When it was completed, his agent suggested Elfman accept a concert that had been offered at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He had been turning down concert versions of movie scores for two decades, largely because they seemed like too much work.

"I thought about it and said if I'm ever going to do it, I should just do it right and do it now," he says. "So I cleared three months from my schedule and committed to do these suites."

Adding to the pressure of the concert was a plan to sing songs from The Nightmare Before Christmas – in the film, Elfman was the voice of hero Jack Skellington.

"It was really scary for me because I hadn't sung publicly in 18 years but there was such a great response from the audience and that just encouraged me that I should do some more. So we continued on and did Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mexico City, Prague, Lucerne.

"Now, coming up to a year, we're already back in Los Angeles, then London again."

Elfman will make his first trip to Australia for the Adelaide Festival.

"There are a number of cities that are doing the Elfman-Burton concerts without me – as a concert suite in symphony halls. But from my point of view, when there's some place I've never been before and there's a chance to go there, I immediately jump in and say yes. It's a great way to get me out of my studio and into the world."

Elfman says it was difficult blending 15 very different suites into a cohesive concert. He wanted to make it a more interesting experience for even fans who know the scores well rather than just a hit parade of movie themes.

"It would have been a lot easier if there were five or six films being represented but 15 is a huge number. Trying to encapsulate an entire film score in the allotted time was really just diving in and trying things out and going 'well that doesn't work' and 'how about this?'.

"I tried to challenge myself for each of the bigger suites to write some new music as well – to write some interstitial material."

Creating the concert proved an odd experience.

"Some of them are dramatic and some of them are very silly," Elfman says. "Going from Pee-wee's Big Adventure and taking it all the way to Alice In Wonderland was a very strange experience.

"I got to see my own development in that process and it really is challenging for the orchestras. Every time we go to a new city, learning the Elfman-Burton show is so difficult because the 15 suites can be so different from one another."

Danny Elfman's Music From The Films of Tim Burton is in Adelaide on March 14.